Posted on 07/07/2005 11:51:19 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
Happy birthday America, you suck. That seemed to be the sentiment of National Book Award winner James Carroll in a July 5 Boston Globe column. "After the fireworks, the music, the rhetoric of freedom -- what then? The party is over. Can we think about what, exactly, we were celebrating?" Carroll asked. "Today's date puts the question of how high-flown American ideals square with the quotidian reality of what the nation is becoming." Carroll ended by wondering: "What kind of nation does our flag fly over now?" He answered: "Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our President demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why." In between, he declared: "The American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes."
CUT
....But what about today? In assessing post-celebration realities of the national moment, it may help to recall that America has never been an innocent nation, which is seen in its having constantly sought to appear as one. Indeed, the planting of the flag in self-affirming virtue is how the hallowed standard comes most readily under fire. The most poignant honoring of the flag of which I know is the US Marine Corps Memorial in Arlington, the magnificent bronze rendering of the famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of five weary leathernecks and a Navy medic raising the flag on Iwo Jima....
The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue.
As much as the defeat of militarized Japanese fascism was a victory, the war was also a tragedy, and the Iwo Jima image of desperate men around the flag acknowledges that, too. A new American tragedy is unfolding in Iraq. Not even its supporters pretend to see glory in this war now, and who imagines anything like "victory" any more? But if an iconic American image of the Iraqi struggle emerges, it will probably not resemble the Iwo Jima statue because amputation and mutilation have become hallmarks of the GI experience of the "improvised explosive devices" that ambush them....
The "bursting in air" of July 4th is an implicit glorification of war. On the day after, can we think of those combat survivors who will carry the real cost of the Iraqi war in their bodies forever? And how can we think of those American daughters and sons without thinking of their even more numerous Iraqi sisters and brothers?
What kind of nation does our flag fly over now? Not a less innocent one, because American innocence was never the truth. Not one less reluctant to go to war without a good reason, because we have foolishly credited bad reasons in the past. But now the nation lacks even that. As our president demonstrated last week, we have become a people who wage unending war -- killing and maiming our young ones and theirs -- without being remotely able to say why.
END of Excerpt
For Carroll's July 5 column in full: www.boston.com
That paranoid, Manichaean mindset has Europe in its grip in some very powerful ways, and now the United States has joined it. This 21st Century war against Islam is the issue. The war in Iraq is making America the enemy of Muslims. And radical Muslim movements are on the upswing because of us. Because of us, not because of the jihadists from Saudi Arabia.
In our lifetimes, Islam has been a dozen different things. Islam in Indonesia, Islam in India, Islam in Bangladesh -- all very different from Islam in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Islam in China is very different. And yet all Muslims have reason now to suspect that they’ve been targeted in this broad, sweeping war of civilization, articulated by Huntington, and now really being waged by the Pentagon. It’s a terrible mistake, and it’s going to put its stamp on the 21st Century. It’s a nightmare.
PING!
These idiots are so tedious. At least the guy comes across as an unvarnished anti-American, sans the usual lipservice from the left about "love of country."
Ah, I was waiting for the Democratic response to the fireworks ever since the last cannonshot of the 1812 Overture in Washington DC.
Here it is.
An idea that obsesses the liberals. I've never once--not ONCE--heard a conservative talk about American innocence. But the left, which worships the imaginary "childlike" innocence as being a folk song-singing outstretched hand holding "bread" or "comfort" can't get over these ridiculous myths.
Carroll is adamantly anti-American and anti-Catholic, to boot. No wonder the Globe loves him.
Bull. The clash is a war between civilization and barbarism, and anyone who fails to see that isn't fit to be included among the *civilized.*
He must be a ghostwriter for Howard Dean.
Did this a$$hole just wake up ala Rip Van Winkle? Hey Carroll! What about the last 50 years (acutally the last 1400 years)? What part of submission don't you understand? Sheesh.
I guess being a dickhead comes easy to some people.
5.56mm
"Can we think about what, exactly, we were celebrating?"
Freedom, country, courage, our ancestors, the valiant dead who defended our country from its enemies, our children who will inherit what we leave them?
We sure weren't celebrating James Carroll and his friends.
If this doofus has to ask (whether rhetorically or literally) what we are celebrating, then he's not the kind of American worth sacrificing a single soldier's life for.
Who is James Carroll and why do we give d@mn what he thinks? Esp. since he seems to be from the PRM that continually re-elects scum like Ted Kennedy?
Carroll is a learned man whose ethics are truly bizarre, to me. He lives in that imaginary planet where if only we were all liberal, the world would be perfect. As a Bostonian I've been reading him for years, and I have to admit I don't think I've ever completely read ONE of his columns; the ignorance is too much for me to deal with. His view of human nature makes me suspect he's never held a blue collar job, never spent much time with people from varied opinions and socio-economic backgrounds, and only talks with people he knows share his worldview.
Too true. If everyone on the left was as honest about their true feelings about America as this jerk, the Dims would never win another election.
It is so terribly ironic that a schmuck like this can say dreadful things about the United States while our soldiers are defending his right to say such dreadful things. How dare he!
SOB, if he doesn't like it here, well, he ought to leave, go to Canada and get it over with - once an for all.
Phew. Feel better now.
You must be a masochist. Carroll sucks on the same level as Derrick "Z" Jackson.
>>>Ah, I was waiting for the Democratic response to the fireworks ever since the last cannonshot of the 1812 Overture in Washington DC.
Speaking of the 1812 Overture, does anyone else think it odd that on the day on which we celebrate our independence from England one of the most played songs is an orchestral work by a Russian commemorating the victory of Russia in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812?
Oh yeah, if we'd only given Al Qaeda in Iraq therapy instead of shooting and bombing them, they wouldn't be murdering Egyptian Envoys in Baghdad or blowing up busses, trains, and subways in Spain and Britain.
Not!
James Carroll should log on to his ATEX terminal at the Globe and type "INIT DP:" That should do the trick.
Any music that requires cannons as percussion is OK with me.
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